Another way to determine whether it's widescreen is that, in this case, there's no credit for CinemaScope (Fox's later w/s process). You can also simply tell that this isn't a widescreen movie being run "full screen" because none of the actors speaks from off-screen, there's no panning-and-scanning, and so on.
There were a few widescreen films made before 1953. Fox Film Corporation (one of the predecessors of 20th Century-Fox) used a process called "Grandeur" for a couple of films in 1930, notably The Big Trail with a young John Wayne. But widescreen films weren't a novelty that people cared for and theaters didn't want to invest in changing the size of their screens to accommodate the wider image, so the idea died off until desperation over the threat of TV moved Fox and other companies to move to widescreen processes in the early 50s, which the equally strapped theaters were now happy to accept.
The process Fox later called CinemaScope was actually developed over thirty years earlier, but dusted off as something "new" in 1953.
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armouredway
10 years ago
A filmography of 11 movies from 1929 to 1931 which were filmed in
widescreen or utilized some widescreen shots. Unfortunately most
are either lost or only a fullscreen version survives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_widescreen_feature_filmography
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talisencrw
9 years ago
The Big Trail is one of my favourites of the early widescreen trailblazers. The two reasons it didn't take off, and had to be scrapped until a much less expensive solution was formed in the 50's, were that it was extremely expensive for theatres to be renovated in order to show these films, and it was done just on the cusp of the Great Depression. Since filming this way was extremely expensive, the new financial circumstances meant the process had to be scrapped. There's a lot about this in the documentary extras on the 2-disc set of The Big Trail. A neat thing about that release is that it has both versions, though since I loved the 70mm version so much, I have no wish to see the full screen rendition.
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